'It wasn't like that,' I said.
'Crime passionnel,' said Lisl. 'He was furious, the man who came to collect her. He roared off on his motor cycle with a terrible look on his face. I could see there was trouble ahead.'
'What man on a motor cycle?'
My question gave Lisl instant and profound satisfaction. She smiled smugly. 'Ah! You don't know it all, Liebchen. So they didn't tell you about her man following her. I was frightened for your safety, Bernd. If he'd found you together ...'
'Tell me more about the man. How do you know he was looking for Tessa?'
'He was her boyfriend or some sort of paramour. He was asking everyone where she was.'
'What did he look like?' I asked her.
'Oh, I don't know: older than you, Bernd, quite a lot older. Plumpish, but strong-looking, with trimmed grey beard and American-style glasses. He kept saying he was late. He was carrying two of those big shiny helmets. Two of them! I suppose one was for her to wear while on the back of the bike.'
'You're right, Tante Lisl. I didn't know about him.' It was a man named Thurkettle. So that was the missing link. It all started at that damned fancy-dress party at List's hotel. Until now I'd never been able to believe that Tessa's death was part of a conspiracy, for I'd taken her to the Brandenburg Exit, that place on the East German Autobahn where she met her death. And since then I'd been blaming myself for everything that happened. When I set out from the party to meet Fiona, in her escape to the West, I'd let Tessa climb into the van ... or at least I'd not dragged Tessa out of it, the way I should have done. But now it seemed more likely that Tessa had deliberately got a lift with me, perhaps because Thurkettle had not turned up to collect her.
'Detectives came next day. They said there were reports of drug-taking at the party. I said I didn't know half the people who were there. They spoke to Werner too. They didn't come back. Were there people taking drugs that night?'
'I don't know, Tante Lisl. I didn't see anyone who looked particularly high.'
'Not even that woman a Tessa?'
'Perhaps.'
It was a trap: 'She was on drugs, Bernd. How can you deny it?'
'You may be right, Lisl. She was behaving very strangely.'
'I hate drugs. You don't take anything like that, I hope.'
'No, Lisl, I don't.'
'You've got to think of your family, Bernd.'
'I do, Lisl. I don't take drugs.'
'Neither does Werner I hope.'
'No, I'm sure he doesn't,' I said.
'Have you spoken with Werner?'
'I always come to see you first.'
She smiled. She knew it wasn't true. 'Werner is backwards and forwards. Doing things over there. It's dangerous, Liebchen. Can't you stop him?'
'You know what Werner is like,' I said. 'How could I tell him what to do?'
'He respects you, Bernd. You are his closest friend.'
'Sometimes I wonder if that's still true.'
'Yes, it is,' she snapped. 'Werner thinks the world of you.'
'He's back with Zena,' I said.
'He told me.' She rolled her head and stared at me in a wide-eyed grimace that signified that the world was a strange place in which outspoken judgements concerning such partnerships could be hazardous. 'Perhaps it's all for the best.'
Poor Ingrid. So that's how the situation had played out. I suppose she was the focus of Lisl's displeasure for changing the hotel. It was too inconvenient to blame Werner. 'I liked Ingrid,' I said cautiously. 'Zena is just out for what she can get. She doesn't care about him.'
'You can't tell people whom they must love, Liebchen. That's something I learned many years ago.' Lisl's upper body swayed, and then using the strength of both arms she got to her feet with admirable agility. 'I shall now have my afternoon nap. The doctor says it's important for me. You go and find Werner. I think I heard him come in.'
'There's nothing wrong with your ears, Lisl.' I hadn't heard Werner or anyone else come in.
'He has that room with the hard mattress. I think his spine is bothering him again; he's always suffered with his back. The door squeaks. And you must tell him to stop going over there.'
'I'll try, Tante Lisl.'
'It's lovely to have you back here, Liebchen. Just like old times. But if your people in London want to find the killer of that woman ...' she paused. Her tone of voice expressed considerable doubt about this being our wish. 'Look for the man on the motor bicycle.'
'Yes, Lisl.'
Werner must have had hearing as acute as Lisl, for no sooner had I left Lisl's study to find a seat in the salon than he came in carrying a vase with a dozen long-stem red roses in it. 'Has she gone?' he asked.
'For a nap.' Werner always remembered to buy her flowers.
'I'd better not disturb her,' he said, although we both knew that Lisl's naps were convenient fictions, contrived to enable her to do the crossword in Die Welt, or drink a glass of sherry without the distraction of polite conversation. 'I'll take them to her later.' Werner put the flowers on the piano.
The piano was open and Werner couldn't resist fingering the keys while standing over it, but in deference to Lisl's notional nap he stopped after a couple of bars. Still at the piano he said: 'She keeps nagging me about exercising and losing weight.' His tailored tweed pants and custom-made shirt were obviously Zena's doing, and he was looking very trim despite Lisl's recommendations. It was certainly a change from his usual outfit of baggy corduroy trousers and old knitted shirt.
'She does that to everyone,' I told him.
He closed the piano. 'It's the hip replacement. She's suddenly discovered good health. She is fired with all that evangelizing zeal of the newly slender.'
'You need have no fear of anything like that from me,' I said.
'She treats me like a small child.'
'She worries about you.' Werner pulled a face. 'She worries about you going over there,' I said and pronounced druben a over there a in the slurring exaggerated way that Lisl always said it.
'I haven't been over there,' said Werner in the same voice.
'I thought you were there doing Dicky Cruyer's bidding.'
'Bidding?'
'A network for VERDI.'
Airily he said: 'You're losing your grip, Bernie. You don't go over there when you are negotiating that kind of deal. That would tempt them to lean upon you heavily, or even arrest you on a charge of suborning a servant of the People. No, at the very first contact when you are enrolling a first-rate Moscow-trained bastard like VERDI, you make him come over here and talk.' There was a certain restrained relish to the manner in which Werner delivered this lesson. Playing at spies for London Central was to Werner what batting for England represented for Dicky Cruyer: a dream so precious that it was usually referred to only by means of bad jokes.
'So VERDI came here?'
'It's the rule isn't it? The first contact must be on home ground?'
'What do you want me to say, Werner? Do you want me to ask you to lecture at the training school or would writing an instruction manual be enough?'
'VERDI came here to West Berlin. I showed him the written enrolment contract that Dicky sent to me. VERDI locked himself into a room the Russian Army keep for the soldiers who guard the memorial, and read it carefully three hundred times. I sat outside in the car and got a chill.'
'And he agreed?'
'I think so. Yes.'
'So you'll set up a network?'
Werner gave a mirthless little snort. 'Set up a network? How would I do that?'
'Isn't that what Dicky wants?'
'It's early days. Let's see what VERDI can provide.'
'I thought Dicky was in a hurry,' I said.
'Yes, he is,' said Werner cryptically.
'What did the contract offer?'
'It was a contract a a sealed pack.'
'But what did it say?' I persisted.
'Dicky said I was just to be a messenger. He said it was safer for me personally to stay at arm's length from the deal. VERDI doesn't know that I'm the one who is supposed to set up the channel to handle his material. No danger of VERDI expecting answers to his questions if I am just the messenger.'
'So what was in the contract?'
'I thought I'd better have a quick look through it,' he admitted, shifting uneasily. 'You won't say anything in London?'
'You know me, Werner. I'll go back there and tell Dicky everything you say. I've already promised him to have your room bugged.'
'The usual contract,' said Werner, and gave me an uneasy smile. He wouldn't budge. He didn't believe I would spy on him but simply hearing me say it was enough to have him give all his attention to picking imaginary cotton threads from his dark shirt.
I watched him for a moment and then I said: 'I used to know someone named Werner Volkmann. A nice kid: four beats to a bar. Maybe not always straight and level but I knew his rate-one turns would have just enough bank and rudder. Do you see anything of that kid nowadays?'
'What do you want from me, Bernd?' I was Bernd now; no longer Bernie.
'You've changed,' I said. 'I don't know where I am with you any more. Back in the old days you would never have told me not to go back to Dicky and spill anything you told me. We were partners. So what's the deal nowadays? What did I do, Werner? Or what did you do?'
'Zena was reporting on me. Reporting back to London.' So it hurt that much.
'So she told me.'
'On me!' he said. I obviously had not reacted energetically enough to his cry of pain. I scowled. 'Checking on me while I was living with her,' he added, just to make it clear.
'I got it, Werner. So how does that have any bearing on why you won't tell me what was in VERDI's contract?'
'Why didn't you tell me what Zena was up to? Did you think it was smart to play with me like that?'
'Come along, Werner, you don't think I knew that she was on the payroll? London doesn't tell me things like that.'
'You're one of them.'
'One of what?'
He shrugged. 'You're British; I'm German.'
'Go and take a cold shower, Werner. Then come back and tell me what was in that contract.'
'Why?'
'Because tomorrow I'm going over there to talk to VERDI's dad.'
His eyes fixed on mine as his brain searched rapidly through the computer. 'Yes, I heard the old man was still alive. Is he still in Pankow?'
'Sure to be. You don't move out of one of those pension houses in Pankow. Not when the alternative is living in an unheated barracks in Moscow. None of the Russians want to go back.'
'Watch your step with him,' Werner said. 'He's sure to be a believer of the old school.'
'He was on the payroll. Our payroll. Do you know that, Werner?' I could see that I'd surprised him, despite his trying to hide it. 'Dad paid him right through the Berlin airlift. Wonderful stuff about the Soviet estimates. Dad was running him personally.'
'That explains a number of things.'
'For instance?'
'Those gold sovereigns we took to Zurich a remember?'
'No, Werner. That was years and years afterwards. We were only kids at the time of the airlift.'
'Your dad wouldn't let a contact like that go cold. How many agents did your father run? Run personally, I mean? I'll bet your dad kept paying him. I'll bet the monthly payments we used to make to Madame Xavier were a Swiss bank account for him.'
I'd never thought of that. 'It's possible,' I agreed finally.
'Madame Xavier,' he repeated.
'Maybe.'
'You thought your dad had a woman over there,' said Werner. 'You thought Madame Xavier was his fancy woman.'
'I never did.'